Hasil untuk "Animal culture"

Van-Ba Hoa, Won-Seo Park, Ja-Yeon Yoo et al.

Abstract Increasing the use and cycling of meat by-products is essential to increase economic benefits and reduce environmental pollution. Among the meat by-products, bones are widely used as food for human consumption and are important raw materials in other related industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals). However, their shelf-life during storage and nutritional composition have not been evaluated. The main objective of this study was to assess the collagen content, amino acid and fatty acid composition, and shelf-life of bones during refrigerated storage. For this study, the leg, brisket, and pelvic bones of Hanwoo cattle collected 24 h after slaughter were used. The bones were prepared into 1 cm thick pieces, placed on trays, overwrapped with plastic film, and stored at 4 °C for 21 days. The samples were then analyzed for aerobic plate count (APC), color, total volatile basic nitrogen (TVBN), lipid oxidation, collagen, amino acid, and fatty acid composition. After 21 d of storage, the APC increased faster in brisket bone (by 5.67 log10 CFU/cm2). Brisket bone also showed a faster increase in TVBN (by 16.79 mg/100 g) and TBARS (by 4.08 mg malondialdehyde/kg) compared to other remaining bones after 21 d of storage. The a* (redness) values significantly decreased with increased storage time in all the bones. The total collagen and essential amino acid contents ranged among the bones from 7.09 to 7.54 g/100 g and 501.92 to 853.20 mg/100 g, respectively. The unsaturated fatty acid (UFA) content among the bones varied from 46.75% to 52.38%.

Sultan Mubarak Z, Jumatriatika Hadrawi, Ummul Masir

Ayam ULU (Unggas Lestari Unggul) adalah persilangan antar ayam pelung dengan ayam ras Perancis bertujuan untuk mendapatkan kualitas daging ayam yang menyerupai ayam kampung. Pada pemeliharaan ayam ULU memerlukan manajemen pemeliharaan yang baik agar potensi genetik ayam tersebut dapat tercapai. Tepung buah mengkudu mengandung zat-zat bioaktif yang mampu meningkatkankan produksi unggas. Tujuan penelitian untuk menentukan tingkat pemberian terbaik tepung buah mengkudu pada Pakan. Ternak yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah 60 ekor ULU (Unggas Lestari Unggul) umur  30 hari. Kandang yang digunakan pada penelitian ini adalah kandang postal dengan sistem semi closed house. Penelitian ini dirancang menggunakan Rancangan Acak Lengkap (RAL) dengan empat perlakuan dan tiga ulangan, masing-masing ulangan menggunakan lima ekor ayam. Keempat perlakuan tersebut adalah ayam yang diberikan pakan komersil tanpa penambahan tepung buah mengkudu sebagai kontrol (P0), pakan basal yang ditambahkan 5 % tepung buah mengkudu (P1), pakan basal yang ditambahkan 10 % tepung buah mengkudu (P2), dan pakan basal yang ditambahkan 15 % tepung buah mengkudu melalui pakan (P3). Variabel yang diamati selama penelitian meliputi meliputi parameter persentase karkas dan persentase bagian-bagian karkas ayam ULU. Hasil penelitian menunjukan tidak ada perbedaan nyata (P>0,05) pemberian tepung buah mengkudu pada pakan dengan persentase karkas setiap perlakuan dengan persentase karkas 63,15-64,79, dan bagian-bagian karkas paha (43,47%-44,47%), sayap (13,23%-14,60%), dada (27,69%-28,03%) dan punggung (12,92%-15,62%). Kesimpulan dari penelitian bahwa penggunaan tepung buah mengkudu pada pakan dapat diberikan hingga taraf 15%.

Xinyi Li, Shuhui Pan, Yun Zheng et al.

Spotted scat (Scatophagus argus), an economically significant marine fish species, is widely distributed along the coasts of Guangxi, Taiwan and Guangdong Province in China. It exhibits sexual growth dimorphism, with females exhibiting a faster growth rate and larger size than males. The critical metabolic organ liver plays an important role in regulating body growth and reproduction processes, which that are influenced by estrogens. In this study, the molecular mechanisms of 17-estradiol (E2) regulates body growth and reproduction in livers were investigated by transcriptome sequencing, after fed 2-year-old spotted scat with E2-containing baits for 30 days. Transcriptome analysis identified 218, 1949, 548, and 1718 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (FDR < 0.05 and |log2(FC)| ≥ 1) in livers of spotted scat across the Ctrl-ML vs. Ctrl-FL, E2-ML vs. E2-FL, E2-ML vs. Ctrl-ML, and E2-FL vs. Ctrl-FL groups, respectively. The amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism pathway was significantly influenced in females by E2. While fatty acid metabolism, arginine and proline metabolism were significantly enriched in males. Several genes metabolic (acsl5, gpx1b, and nots), growth and reproduction-related genes (igfs, vtgs, erα, and zps) were responded to E2 in a gender-specific manner. Thus, the livers of females appeared to be more sensitive to E2 feeding than males, and the responsive mechanisms of spotted scat livers to E2 were gender-specific. These findings will provide a foundation for understanding the molecular regulation of estrogen in fish growth and reproduction within the liver, and will also offer theoretical evidence for the artificial cultivation of spotted scat.

James Winters, Mathieu Charbonneau

Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase their capacity to store, transmit and process information at a collective-level. Here, we propose that the production of resources arises from the interaction between cultural systems (a society's repertoire of interdependent techniques, artifacts, norms and knowledge) and search spaces (an ensemble of needs, problems and goals facing a society). Starting from this premise we develop a macro-level model wherein both cultural systems and search spaces are subject to evolutionary dynamics. By manipulating the extent to which these dynamics are characterised by stochastic or selection-like processes, we demonstrate that open-ended growth is extremely rare, historically contingent and only possible when cultural systems and search spaces co-evolve. Here, stochastic factors must be strong enough to continually perturb the dynamics into a far-from-equilibrium state, whereas selection-like factors help maintain effectiveness and ensure the sustained production of resources. Only when this co-evolutionary dynamic maintains effective cultural systems, supports the ongoing expansion of the search space and leads to an increased provision of resources do we observe open-ended cultural evolution.

Vladimir Martirosyan, Rachit Kamdar

Online reviews shape impressions across products and workplaces. Employer reviews combine narratives and ratings that reflect culture. Glassdoor permits fully anonymous posts; Blind requires employment verification while preserving anonymity. We ask how verification changes reviews. Evidence suggests verified reviews can be more trustworthy, yet verification can also erode authenticity when expectations are unmet. We use the Competing Values Framework (clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, market) and the CultureBERT model by Koch and Pasch, 2023 to over 300k ratings. We find that Blind reviews emphasize clan and hierarchy while Glassdoor skews positive and highlights clan and market. Verification on its own does not remove bias but shifts how culture is represented. Job seekers using different platforms receive systematically different signals about workplace culture, affecting application decisions and job-matching.

Arnav Yayavaram, Siddharth Yayavaram, Simran Khanuja et al.

As text-to-image models become increasingly prevalent, ensuring their equitable performance across diverse cultural contexts is critical. Efforts to mitigate cross-cultural biases have been hampered by trade-offs, including a loss in performance, factual inaccuracies, or offensive outputs. Despite widespread recognition of these challenges, an inability to reliably measure these biases has stalled progress. To address this gap, we introduce CAIRe, an evaluation metric that assesses the degree of cultural relevance of an image, given a user-defined set of labels. Our framework grounds entities and concepts in the image to a knowledge base and uses factual information to give independent graded judgments for each culture label. On a manually curated dataset of culturally salient but rare items built using language models, CAIRe surpasses all baselines by 22% F1 points. Additionally, we construct two datasets for culturally universal concepts, one comprising T2I-generated outputs and another retrieved from naturally occurring data. CAIRe achieves Pearson's correlations of 0.56 and 0.66 with human ratings on these sets, based on a 5-point Likert scale of cultural relevance. This demonstrates its strong alignment with human judgment across diverse image sources.

Xiaojuan Wang, Aleksander Holynski, Brian Curless et al.

We present a framework for generating music-synchronized, choreography aware animal dance videos. Our framework introduces choreography patterns -- structured sequences of motion beats that define the long-range structure of a dance -- as a novel high-level control signal for dance video generation. These patterns can be automatically estimated from human dance videos. Starting from a few keyframes representing distinct animal poses, generated via text-to-image prompting or GPT-4o, we formulate dance synthesis as a graph optimization problem that seeks the optimal keyframe structure to satisfy a specified choreography pattern of beats. We also introduce an approach for mirrored pose image generation, essential for capturing symmetry in dance. In-between frames are synthesized using an video diffusion model. With as few as six input keyframes, our method can produce up to 30 seconds dance videos across a wide range of animals and music tracks.

Auwalu Abdullahi Umar, Muneer Ahmad, Dr M Sadik Batcha

The significance of libraries in preserving and maintaining history and traditional culture cannot be overlooked. It is from this purpose that libraries are to envisage in their programmes cultural activities which must be collected, documented and preserved for posterity. The usefulness of preserved information lies in the fact that the generation to come will be able to establish their identity. This will also assist them with a foundation to build from. This study focus on the growth and development of Library and Culture research in forms of publications reflected in Web of Science database, during the span of 2010-2019. A total 890 publications were found and the highest 124 (13.93%) publications published in 2019.The analysis maps comprehensively the parameters of total output, growth of output, authorship, institution wise and country-level collaboration patterns, major contributors (individuals, top publication sources, institutions, and countries). It exposed that the most prolific author is Lo P secured first place by contributing 4 (0.45%) publications, followed by Bressan V 3 (0.34%) publications in Library and Culture literature. Journal of Academic Librarianship produced the highest number of records 29 (3.26%) followed by Australian Library Journal having contributed 21 (2.36%).It is identified the domination of Wuhan University; School Information Management had contributed 6 (0.67%) of total research output. Authors from USA published the highest number of publications with a total of 244 (27.42%), followed by UK and Australia with 118 (13.26%) and 76 (8.54%) publications were produced respectively.

Hanadi B. A. Baghdadi, Mohamed Abdelsalam, Marwa M. Attia

Abstract Strongylus vulgaris, a devastating parasitic nematode in equids, causes life-threatening verminous aneurysms that are challenging to diagnose early. This study pioneered integrating nanotechnology into an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (i-ELISA) system to enhance the sensitivity and specificity for detecting S. vulgaris larval antigens in equine serum samples, with PCR confirmation of the species. A conventional i-ELISA and an innovative nano-based ELISA were developed using excretory-secretory antigens from adult S. vulgaris worms. The nano-ELISA incorporated gold nanoparticles (17.4–41.4 nm) conjugated with detection antibodies, enabling remarkable signal amplification. Of the 120 examined equines, 100 (83.33%) were positive for S. vulgaris infection. A conventional i-ELISA and an innovative nano-ELISA incorporating 17.4–41.4 nm gold nanoparticles were optimized using S. vulgaris excretory-secretory antigens. Both assays demonstrated high specificity, with no cross-reactivity against sera from animals infected with other helminth parasites. Remarkably, optical density (OD) readings from both i-ELISAs exhibited a positive quantitative correlation with infection intensity. The i-ELISA OD ranged from 0.45–0.74 (G3), 0.75–0.94 (G2), to 0.95–2.5 (G1). The nano-ELISA showed enhanced signal amplification, with OD ranging from 0.40–0.84 (G3), 0.85–0.99 (G2), to 1.0–3.5 (G1). This nanotechnology-amplified ELISA opens new, highly sensitive, and specific techniques for parasitic diagnosis in equine medicine. Its superior performance, facilitated by signal-amplifying gold nanoparticles, illuminates nanotechnology's potential in revolutionizing parasitological diagnostics for enhanced animal health and welfare management.

Chen-Chi Chang, Ching-Yuan Chen, Hung-Shin Lee et al.

This study introduces a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and processing cultural knowledge, with a specific focus on Hakka culture as a case study. Leveraging Bloom's Taxonomy, the study develops a multi-dimensional framework that systematically assesses LLMs across six cognitive domains: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. This benchmark extends beyond traditional single-dimensional evaluations by providing a deeper analysis of LLMs' abilities to handle culturally specific content, ranging from basic recall of facts to higher-order cognitive tasks such as creative synthesis. Additionally, the study integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to address the challenges of minority cultural knowledge representation in LLMs, demonstrating how RAG enhances the models' performance by dynamically incorporating relevant external information. The results highlight the effectiveness of RAG in improving accuracy across all cognitive domains, particularly in tasks requiring precise retrieval and application of cultural knowledge. However, the findings also reveal the limitations of RAG in creative tasks, underscoring the need for further optimization. This benchmark provides a robust tool for evaluating and comparing LLMs in culturally diverse contexts, offering valuable insights for future research and development in AI-driven cultural knowledge preservation and dissemination.

Vanessa Suessle, Marco Heurich, Colleen T. Downs et al.

The bilateral asymmetry of flanks of animals with visual body marks that uniquely identify an individual, complicates tasks like population estimations. Automatically generated additional information on the visible side of the animal would improve the accuracy for individual identification. In this study we used transfer learning on popular CNN image classification architectures to train a flank predictor that predicts the visible flank of quadruped mammalian species in images. We automatically derived the data labels from existing datasets originally labeled for animal pose estimation. We trained the models in two phases with different degrees of retraining. The developed models were evaluated in different scenarios of different unknown quadruped species in known and unknown environments. As a real-world scenario, we used a dataset of manually labeled Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) from camera traps in the Bavarian Forest National Park to evaluate the model. The best model, trained on an EfficientNetV2 backbone, achieved an accuracy of 88.70 % for the unknown species lynx in a complex habitat.

Lukáš Adam, Vojtěch Čermák, Kostas Papafitsoros et al.

This paper introduces WildlifeReID-10k, a new large-scale re-identification benchmark with more than 10k animal identities of around 33 species across more than 140k images, re-sampled from 37 existing datasets. WildlifeReID-10k covers diverse animal species and poses significant challenges for SoTA methods, ensuring fair and robust evaluation through its time-aware and similarity-aware split protocol. The latter is designed to address the common issue of training-to-test data leakage caused by visually similar images appearing in both training and test sets. The WildlifeReID-10k dataset and benchmark are publicly available on Kaggle, along with strong baselines for both closed-set and open-set evaluation, enabling fair, transparent, and standardized evaluation of not just multi-species animal re-identification models.

WAHYUNI ., RAHMI DIANITA, R. A. MUTHALIB et al.

Storage period is one of the factors which affect the physical and chemical quality of the stored material. This study aimed to determine the effect of storage period on the chemical quality of livestock concentrate biscuits con- taining Indigofera and sengon. Four periods of storage period were arranged in a completely randomized design which was repeated 5 times. The storage period consisted of 0, 7, 14 and 21 days. The chemical qualities observed in- cluded moisture and ash content, crude protein and crude fiber. The results showed that storage period significantly reduced the moisture content of concentrate biscuit, while the ash content, crude protein and crude fiber were not affected by storage period. It was concluded that the concentrate biscuits containing Indigofera and sengon could be stored for up to 21 days with good chemical quality.

Ilaria Iacopetti, Anna Perazzi, Marco Patruno et al.

Regenerative medicine for the treatment of skin lesions is an innovative and rapidly developing field that aims to promote wound healing and restore the skin to its original condition before injury. Over the years, different topical treatments have been evaluated to improve skin wound healing and, among them, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) have shown promising results for this purpose. This study sought to evaluate the quality of the healing process in experimentally induced full-thickness skin lesions treated with PRP associated or unassociated with MSCs in a sheep second intention wound healing model. After having surgically created full-thickness wounds on the back of three sheep, the wound healing process was assessed by performing clinical evaluations, histopathological examinations, and molecular analysis. Treated wounds showed a reduction of inflammation and contraction along with an increased re-epithelialization rate and better maturation of the granulation tissue compared to untreated lesions. In particular, the combined treatment regulated the expression of collagen types I and III resulting in a proper resolution of the granulation tissue contrary to what was observed in untreated wounds; moreover, it led to a better maturation and organization of skin adnexa and collagen fibers in the repaired skin compared to untreated and PRP-treated wounds. Overall, both treatments improved the wound healing process compared to untreated wounds. Wounds treated with PRP and MSCs showed a healing progression that qualitatively resembles a restitutio ad integrum of the repaired skin, showing features typical of a mature healthy dermis.

Ashley S Villatoro, Holly A Phelps, Justin B Ganjei

Abstract Background Bupivacaine lioposomal suspension has recently emerged in the veterinary field for local analgesia. Objective To describe the extra‐label administration of bupivacaine liposomal suspension at the incision site of dogs undergoing limb amputation and characterize any complications. Study Design Nonblinded retrospective study. Animals Client‐owned dogs undergoing limb amputation from 2016 to 2020. Methods Medical records of dogs undergoing limb amputation with concurrent use of long‐acting liposomal bupivacaine suspension were reviewed for incisional complications, adverse effects, hospitalization length, and time to alimentation. Data were compared to a control group (CG) of dogs who underwent a limb amputation procedure without concurrent use of liposomal bupivacaine suspension. Results Forty‐six dogs were included in the liposomal bupivacaine group (LBG) and 44 cases in the CG. The CG had 15 incidences of incisional complications (34%) compared to 6 within the LBG (13%). Four dogs required revisional surgery in the CG (9%) whereas none of the dogs required revisional surgery in the LBG. Time from surgery to discharge was statistically higher in the CG compared to the LBG (p = 0.025). First time to alimentation was statistically higher in the CG (p value = 0.0002). The total number of rechecks needed postoperatively revealed the CG having a statistically significant increase in recheck evaluations (p = 0.001). Conclusions Extra‐label administration of liposomal bupivacaine suspension was well‐tolerated in dogs undergoing limb amputation. Liposomal bupivacaine usage did not increase incisional complication rates and its use allowed for a quicker time to discharge. Clinical significance Surgeons should consider inclusion of extra‐label administration of liposomal bupivacaine in analgesic regimens for dogs undergoing limb amputation.

Le Jiang, Sarah Ostadabbas

Animal pose estimation has become a crucial area of research, but the scarcity of annotated data is a significant challenge in developing accurate models. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising alternative, but it frequently exhibits domain discrepancies with real data. Style transfer algorithms have been proposed to address this issue, but they suffer from insufficient spatial correspondence, leading to the loss of label information. In this work, we present a new approach called Synthetic Pose-aware Animal ControlNet (SPAC-Net), which incorporates ControlNet into the previously proposed Prior-Aware Synthetic animal data generation (PASyn) pipeline. We leverage the plausible pose data generated by the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE)-based data generation pipeline as input for the ControlNet Holistically-nested Edge Detection (HED) boundary task model to generate synthetic data with pose labels that are closer to real data, making it possible to train a high-precision pose estimation network without the need for real data. In addition, we propose the Bi-ControlNet structure to separately detect the HED boundary of animals and backgrounds, improving the precision and stability of the generated data. Using the SPAC-Net pipeline, we generate synthetic zebra and rhino images and test them on the AP10K real dataset, demonstrating superior performance compared to using only real images or synthetic data generated by other methods. Our work demonstrates the potential for synthetic data to overcome the challenge of limited annotated data in animal pose estimation.

P. Green, James W. Simpkins

Anastasia S. Tsingotjidou

Oxytocin is a hormone secreted from definite neuroendocrine neurons located in specific nuclei in the hypothalamus (mainly from paraventricular and supraoptic nuclei), and its main known function is the contraction of uterine and/or mammary gland cells responsible for parturition and breastfeeding. Among the actions of the peripherally secreted oxytocin is the prevention of different degenerative disorders. These actions have been proven in cell culture and in animal models or have been tested in humans based on hypotheses from previous studies. This review presents the knowledge gained from the previous studies, displays the results from oxytocin intervention and/or treatment and proposes that the well described actions of oxytocin might be connected to other numerous, diverse actions of the biomolecule.

Hui Nan Hao, Yan Yan Song, Kai Ning Ma et al.

Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of a novel type C lectin from Trichinella spiralis (TsCTL) and its role in larval invasion of intestinal epithelial cells (IECs). TsCTL has a carbohydrate recognition domain (CRD) of C-type lectin. The full-length TsCTL cDNA sequence was cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli BL21. The results of qPCR, Western blotting and immunofluorescence assays (IFAs) showed that TsCTL was a surface and secretory protein that was highly expressed at the T. spiralis intestinal infective larva (IIL) stages and primarily located at the cuticle, stichosome and embryos of the parasite. rTsCTL could specifically bind with IECs, and the binding site was localized in the IEC nucleus and cytoplasm. The IFA results showed that natural TsCTL was secreted and bound to the enteral epithelium at the intestinal stage of T. spiralis infection. The rTsCTL had a haemagglutinating effect on murine erythrocytes, while mannose was able to inhibit the rTsCTL agglutinating effect for mouse erythrocytes. rTsCTL accelerated larval intrusion into the IECs, whereas anti-rTsCTL antibodies and mannose significantly impeded larval intrusion in a dose-dependent manner. The results indicated that TsCTL specifically binds to IECs and promotes larval invasion of intestinal epithelium, and it might be a potential target of vaccines against T. spiralis enteral stages.

Sofia Broomé, Marcelo Feighelstein, Anna Zamansky et al.

Advances in animal motion tracking and pose recognition have been a game changer in the study of animal behavior. Recently, an increasing number of works go 'deeper' than tracking, and address automated recognition of animals' internal states such as emotions and pain with the aim of improving animal welfare, making this a timely moment for a systematization of the field. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of computer vision-based research on recognition of affective states and pain in animals, addressing both facial and bodily behavior analysis. We summarize the efforts that have been presented so far within this topic -- classifying them across different dimensions, highlight challenges and research gaps, and provide best practice recommendations for advancing the field, and some future directions for research.